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Home Is Where the Head Is

HOMEMAKER Christopher K. Travis uses emotional architecture to create a house that is a suite of emotional experiences, he said.

Round Top, Tex.

BUILDING a home, like getting married, is not for the faint of heart. It is a rare individual (or couple) who can manage the mix of high expectations, inexperience and a ballooning budget in service of a goal — a home! — so freighted with meaning, and come out unscathed.

Architects complain that they are asked to behave more like mental health professionals than designers, clients complain that their architects and their mates do not understand them, and the stories of couples coming asunder, or of clients suing their architects, are legion. There are no hard numbers on exactly how many unions, either professional or marital, come to grief or end up in litigation as a result of bungled attempts at homemaking, but there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest a lot of broken hearts.

One poignant story concerned the auction last week of the 26,000-square-foot, $21 million “dream house” of a couple in Connecticut who discovered, once they had built it and moved in, that the house’s style, proportions and accouterments — billiards room, theater and indoor Tuscan-style courtyard — did not fit them at all. “I would be happy with 3,500 square feet,” the wife was reported as saying.

Cases like this have encouraged Christopher K. Travis, 57, an architectural designer here, to ramp up the promotion of his method, an exhaustive psychological and aesthetic compatibility exercise for would-be home builders that is part New Age self-help manual, part personality test. Mr. Travis calls it the Truehome workshop (Truehome is a registered trademark), and he hopes it will do for the design and building profession what eHarmony has done for matchmaking.

“Residential architecture is pretty much broken,” said Mr. Travis, who is not a licensed architect but has one on his staff. “Clients are helpless. They don’t know how to get what they want, they don’t really even know what they want, and architects aren’t really trained to give it to them.”

If you don’t understand the contents, he is fond of saying, how can you design the package?

You may think you want Spanish Colonial, said Mr. Travis, “but I don’t believe you, and I don’t want to hear it.” What he does want to hear is every detail about your relationship with your mother, your issues with your father, and how you feel you might have failed both parents in your life choices. He would also like to know what things about your mate drive you crazy. He uses this information to practice what he calls emotional architecture, to design a house that is not so much “bricks and sticks,” he said, “but a suite of emotional experiences.”

Mr. Travis can sound a bit crazy himself, but he has a track record of happy customers — over 70, he said — and some prominent fans, like Sam Gosling, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who studies how objects and environments reflect people’s inner lives. Mr. Gosling, a mediagenic science star who is a favorite of morning news shows (and was featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s last best seller, “Blink”), was impressed enough by Mr. Travis’s work to write about it in “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You,” published in May by Basic Books.

“It isn’t ludicrous, what he’s proposing,” Mr. Gosling said by cellphone from Budapest, where he was addressing a conference on canine science. “It’s within the realm of possibility,” he continued, to systematize and ameliorate “the dysfunction” in the design process by creating a psychological profile of a client and then designing a home to fit.

To help him do so, Mr. Travis has had a neuropsychologist and a clinical psychologist advising him on his process, which at this point is contained in a huge binder with over 100 pages of questions, visualization exercises and directives — some really goopy (“ask your partner for attention in a way that allows them to decline”) and others more useful (“if your partner’s messiness was behind closed doors, would you be willing to accept it?”). Mr. Travis imagines the contents of this binder uploaded onto an interactive Web site that could be used all over the world.

“Truehome isn’t quite up and running because I ran out of the money Cheryl would let me spend,” said Mr. Travis, referring to his wife.

Truehome is also not yet up and running, suggested Cecil Reynolds, the neuropsychologist overseeing the project, “because it’s going to take a couple of years to collect enough data to see if it really works.” He added, “Chris thinks it will go faster; he has a lot of anecdotal data, and he certainly believes in it, and that makes us think there may be something there.”

One Friday late last month, Mr. Travis, a large, shy man who speaks softly and drives a small silver Toyota Prius, was explaining his method and how he had devised it while careering from lane to lane on the highway that connects Austin and Round Top. Mr. Travis has offices in both towns, and has lived in Round Top since the early 1990s, when he moved from Houston with his wife and their three children, now grown.

With its galleries and nearby performing arts center, palm-size Round Top (population 77) is a magnet for Houston weekenders and urban escapees. It exhibits the sweet and eclectic ecology of progressive Texas: there’s a wine bar, but no farm supply store, and many of the galleries carry the 2009 Women of Round Top calendar, which features winsome nude portraits of local female notables, most of whom are gloriously past the midcentury mark. (“It’s socially conscious, officially sanctioned Round Top porn,” Mr. Travis said proudly, noting that the calendar’s sales benefit a nearby animal shelter; next July’s pin-up is the 73-year-old former mayor, Carol Nagel, who wears only a straw boater in her photograph.)

Mr. Travis has served on the town council and is the publisher of The Round Top Register, the town’s comic, partly fictional (and only) newspaper, most of which he writes (though he has just hired a new editor because he is too busy to do so anymore). “We’ve been called the ‘Prairie Home Companion’ of the Lone Star State,” he said.

When he arrived here, in 1992, though, he was bankrupt, he said, having been fleeced by partners he had joined in the whirlpool bath business. (Mr. Travis was a philosophy major at the University of Texas, Austin, and had his own construction business after college.) He bought a Texas walnut cabin for $3,000 and began restoring it for his family, still in Houston, relaxing on the cabin’s porch at night. He was happier than he had been in years, he said, noting that much of his satisfaction came from exhuming childhood memories of rocking on a grandparent’s porch.

Soon after, when his restoration, design and construction business began to grow, he was in a therapeutic frame of mind, and found himself probing clients for information about their house memories and associations. It was a new way of working, he said, that resulted in having every first-round design accepted. “Everyone said, ‘I love my house!’ ” he said. “We were making more money, with less change orders, and so four years ago I sat down and wrote a 10-page questionnaire called Homework that I sent home with every new client.”

Mr. Travis boned up on his subject, reading Christopher Alexander, whose mid-’70s classic, “A Pattern Language,” is still a touchstone for warm and fuzzy architecture; J. Scott Turner, an environmental scientist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who has written about animal-built structures; and Irwin Altman, a social psychologist, now an emeritus faculty member at the University of Utah, who studied how environment affects behavior and wrote extensively about privacy and intimacy.

Mr. Travis rebranded his practice as Sentient Architecture (sentientarchitecture.com) and persuaded 10 of his clients to agree to be guinea pigs for a more elaborate questionnaire — which became the Truehome workshop — for a 20 percent reduction in design fees, he said.

THE Bar None ranch, near Round Top, came out of Mr. Travis’s earlier “homework” period. It’s an 18-month-old, 5,000-square-foot, Tuscan-style house on 200 acres accessorized with split-rail fences, two longhorns, a herd of Brangus cows, three llamas and two miniature donkeys. The ranch is owned by Frank and Jean Raymond, who live in Houston but are transitioning into retirement. (She’s a decorator; his company manufactures valves for the oil and gas industries.)

Mr. Raymond, who had worked hard to make a success of his business, “wanted a more modest house,” Mr. Travis said. “It was hard for him to accept this level of opulence.”

Mr. Raymond said: “Chris forced us into it. I was thinking long weekends, but Jean was thinking long life.” It was Mr. Travis’s questioning that put the couple on the same page, they said.

When his clients are a couple, Mr. Travis requires each person to fill out a separate questionnaire, he said, although the women are more compliant than the men. Mr. Raymond declined to fill out his own questionnaire; he just wrote “ditto” next to his wife’s answers.

Mr. Travis used what he learned to design a stylistic hybrid: a Tuscan skin with an old barn embedded in its main living space and a tower above the master bedroom, based on Mr. Raymond’s happy memories of his father’s art studio, a lighthouse in Stonington, Conn.

“I was shocked,” Ms. Raymond said, “because I hadn’t said Tuscan, I had just said Old World things.”

“By the time he finished with us,” her husband said, “we really knew what we wanted.”

Kathy and Frank Johnston, who live nearby in a German-American Texas farmhouse, are also clients of Mr. Travis’s and Houston professionals — he is in real estate, she runs an ad agency. It took more than 90 days, Ms. Johnston said, to work their way through their separate homework binders: “We took it very seriously.”

When she and her husband brought in their binders, there was an “aha!” moment, she said, “when we realized everything was the same: the same open spaces, the same architectural details”; in addition to his psychological probing, Mr. Travis requires clients to clip photographs of styles and details. “We both looked at each other,” Ms. Johnston remembered, “and said, ‘I can’t believe you like the same stuff!’ ”

Their house is also an interesting hybrid, with a hall that looks like a street in a tiny Italian town, Arts and Crafts-style millwork and interior windows. The kitchen is open on three sides — to the “street,” the back porch and the dining room — allowing Ms. Johnston to connect with the many guests she likes to have in her home.

Mr. Travis said he pulled out Ms. Johnston’s childhood memories of chaotic family mealtimes, and the distress it caused. The kitchen he designed for her is about replacing her unsettling memories with a controlled and happy current environment.

Forty minutes away, in Chappell Hill, Ralph and Lynn Youngblood live in a Creole-style house with a wraparound porch, designed by Mr. Travis, that reminds both of places they loved as children. Ms. Youngblood, who describes herself as “a shrimphead from New Orleans’s Ninth Ward,” grew up in a shotgun house and dreamed of wide porches and window seats. Mr. Youngblood is the son of a farmer who grew up near the Mississippi. They found Mr. Travis through The Round Top Register, Mr. Travis’s paper, which is filled with ads for his business. When Mr. Travis arrived for a consultation, Mr. Youngblood remembered, “Lynn looked out the window and saw this big guy with a long ponytail” — Mr. Travis has since had a haircut — “and said, ‘This is the guy.’ We didn’t want the conventional thing.”

Ms. Youngblood loved the workshop; Mr. Youngblood, a more reticent personality, according to his wife, was stoic and did his best. Still, he said, “the more we got into it, the more it seemed like the way to go. We didn’t want to be sold a house that was somebody else’s idea.”

Mr. Travis, Ms. Youngblood said, drew memories out of her she did not know she had, and they are reflected in his design. “He also doesn’t let you get away with anything,” she said, remembering a battle over a Viking range. “I’m very serious about cooking, and he kept designing it out. He said: ‘How serious are you about worshiping at the altar of the kitchen god? Because this is going to cost you’ — with expensive venting he’d have to create — ‘but if it’s that important to you, go ahead and put it in.’ He made me realize it was about my vanity, and not about what’s practical. He also asks the most provocative questions. It can be exhausting to work with Chris, but I think he does pull out who you really are and not who you think you are or should be.”

The idea of an emotional architecture is not a new one; it has long been the counterbalance to another fundamental architectural principle, that of “rational” space. Karrie Jacobs, an architecture writer and the author of “The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home” (Penguin, 2007), said she thought emotional architecture was a redundancy, like emo rock. “I mean, if architecture isn’t emotional, what good is it?” she said. “This may be a minority opinion, since many Modernists liked to think of themselves and their buildings as utterly rational, but I think that all good architecture, no matter the style or period, has emotional power.”

Interestingly, the Modernist architect Richard Neutra practiced a method similar to Mr. Travis’s, extracting detailed biographies from his clients in a take-home questionnaire, said Alice T. Friedman, professor of the history of American art at Wellesley and the author of “Women and the Making of the Modern House” (Yale University Press; 2006).

The most elaborate of these yielded one of his best houses, the Constance Perkins house in Los Angeles, which he built for Ms. Perkins, a professor on a strict budget. Deeply influenced by Freudian ideas — Mr. Neutra was a Viennese émigré, after all — “he wanted to tailor his houses to individual preferences and psyches,” Ms. Friedman said. “In asking for the personal histories, he was interested in what contact his clients had had with things that made them happy or sad.”

Mr. Travis, while not quite on a level with Richard Neutra, is clearly a sensitive and talented designer. As Ms. Youngblood put it, “he’s not Mr. Standard Subdivision guy”; he is able to interpret his clients’ personal information to create pleasing spaces. How others might implement the “blueprints” yielded by his system is unclear, but Mr. Travis would like to make his process flexible enough so anyone could use it.

“It shows real forward thinking, but I don’t know how realistic that is,” said Toby Israel, author of “Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places.” Ms. Israel is an environmental psychologist in Princeton, N.J., who, like Mr. Travis, helps clients reach “emotional goals” through the décor and layout of their spaces; a lot of her work deals with childhood memories of place. Her method uses one-on-one sessions, like therapy, usually three three-hour marathons, she said, that she conducts herself.

“I totally accept that the story of a house is the story of a life,” she said. “But interpreting that story is not just a science, but an art.” She said it sounded like Mr. Travis was an artful interpreter — clearly “a connector,” she said — and she wondered why he would want to develop his method beyond his client base.

The answer is that Mr. Travis, like a lot of people, dreams of being a successful Internet entrepreneur. At Round Top’s only library, a 1920s Gothic number Mr. Travis rescued from nearby Milam County, he had the words “Why Dream Ordinary” inscribed on the steps leading to the garden.